Problems with Webcomics

Ladydrawers: After my third invitation to support your mostly- or all-male comics event in 24 hours, I respond

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 11:13:30 -0400

Ladydrawers: After my third invitation to support your mostly- or all-male comics event in 24 hours, I respond:

Hi,

My name’s Anne Elizabeth Moore. I’m a cultural critic, and I used to run The Comics Journal, Punk Planet, and the Best American Comics. Comics-wise, I’m currently working with a collective based here in Chicago called Ladydrawers that researches and makes comics about the comics…

ladydrawers: Race of Self-Publishing Comics Creators So the...

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 16:03:18 -0400

ladydrawers:

Race of Self-Publishing Comics Creators

So the Lady Drawers Tumblr FINALLY started posting! Go check it out.

Any interest in expanding the study in the future? I like your work here but 100 seems kind of a small sample size... (unless I'm wrong about the numbers).

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:13:32 -0400

100 is a fairly small sample size, but, as I’ve said, I did the best I could to get a representative sample and I actually feel that the results are fairly accurate, or at least the line up closely with most of what I’ve read online.

I am interested in expanding the study, but at the moment, I absolutely do not have the time. I actually have some interesting nudity stats from this study that I’ve been meaning to turn into an infographic, but can’t find the time for that, and doing that would take a fraction of the time this first study took. (Those will be published eventually though!)

But I mentioned before to another Anon question that if someone wanted to find the stats for the webcomics they read, I would be happy to run the numbers and average those results in as well, and publish the adjusted results here. If you (or anyone reading this) has any interest in that, message me, and I can make sure you have all the information you need!

If there are webcomic creators who want to do this for their own comic, that would be great too!

About the Study: Overview

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 13:50:11 -0400

About the Study: Overview

This was a research project that looked over the 25 latest installments of 100 web comics and studied the characters that appeared within.

A character was defined as:

Named. A title used as a name was accepted. For example, Captain was considered a name. My captain was not.
Appeared in more than one installment.
Spoke.

The webcomics had to fit the following parameters:

Published exclusively or originally on the web.
Currently updating as of mid-April, 2012 at least twice a month.
Fifty pages already published.
Primarily human cast.
Cast stayed largely consistent update to update.
No stick figures or such heavily stylized figures that were impossible to tell apart.

How the webcomics were chosen:

A list of 500 webcomics that fit the parameters was pulled from http://thewebcomiclist.com and friends’ recommendations.
From those 500, 100 were pulled using an online list randomizer (http://www.random.org/lists/). The top 100 after scrambling the list several times were the ones used.
This was meant to provide as random of a sampling of webcomics as possible, based on the principle of simple random sampling without replacement, in the hope that this would provide a more accurate representative sample than consciously choosing based on a personal idea of the breakdown of webcomics.
List of webcomics in the study

Characters were studied to find:

FAQ

(I decided this needed to be at the top again, so I’m just readjusting order)

Photo

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 16:01:58 -0400

Question

Wed, 30 May 2012 16:01:28 -0400

If you have questions, feel free to ask, anonymously or not. I will answer and publish them as long as they are not repeats or purposely offensive.

Please respond to the question if you have something to say. I’ll discuss things with you until I feel like we’re going in circles or until it gets rude. Feel free to reblog or ask a question to respond. (Or ask an initial question)

If you’re question is longer than tumblr allows and you don’t have the option of reblogging because you want to be anonymous or you don’t have a tumblr, please, submit it in more than one ask. Just please use (cont.) or Part 1 or something.

Thanks!

I'm tublr-less - Aly. I have a problem with how you determined gender in this study and come to the conclusion of no trans*people in the webcomics. I have a friend - 'Gary'; now when 'Gary' was born he was assigned the gender 'female' and his parents called him - 'Amy'. He had quite a bit of trouble with puberty etc, and transitioned in the late nineties.I met him at thirty with ablsolutely no "visual clues", I have always refered to him using 'he' and pics are labled Gary not "Gary-who-was-Amy"

Tue, 29 May 2012 19:32:00 -0400

You’re right. It’s entirely possible one of the background characters- or even one of the main characters- was a trans* character. I only read the most recent 25 pages. One of them could have a storyline earlier that addresses it. Or it could be addressed not at all which is another possibility.

If it was addressed earlier or will be addressed in the future, that’s wonderful. It is possible. However, I did go through the character pages and some have quite detailed biographies. This was never mentioned and, from my experience with trans* people and what I’ve read, it is a large part of their life and has influenced their experiences greatly, even if they pass now. But yes, this is a possibility and one I would celebrate if it were true. I could only work with the parts I read and I did the best I could with it.

But what about the other possibility? What if it was just never brought up? After all, some trans* people can go through life without people realizing. Either they naturally look enough like their gender that no one questions it or they’ve undergone hormone and/or surgery to do so. If they were minor characters, then yes, it may just never be brought up at all. As I said, this is very unlikely with main characters. It’s a large part of their life and probably not something that could be hidden. So a side character where the author just thinks of them as, oh hey, they aren’t cissexual. They pass and no one questions it. How is this representation though if it is never acknowledged?

If it’s never acknowledged, not part of the story at all, it’s just like me saying Uhura (from Star Trek) was actually MAAB. The creator could at this point, but if it is never addressed in a movie/tv show? I don’t think it matters because readers and viewers generally only deal with what they are given in the narrative of the story. I’m not saying it has to be a big deal, but it does have to be addressed at some point to be considered representation.

Cissexual people are never going to recognize a trans* person unless if it is brought up or made obvious. In a better, more accepting world, maybe no big deal would have to made of it, but as in society today, unless it is brought up or obvious, most people aren’t going to recognize that a person is trans* and it’s not representation.

I'm not sure that a randomly-chosen hundred comics is the best method to determine what's actually on the web. In the event, you appear to have missed most of the real, live, updating, well-known and widely-followed web comics that _I read every week_. Statistics isn't a monolithic thing: not every project yields up its best information with the same instrument. In short: I think your results don't reflect what people are actually creating and reading.

Sun, 27 May 2012 23:25:00 -0400

On the other hand, do you think you read all the same things as everyone else? The comics you read every week are probably not the same ones I read every week or the same ones Joe, the IT guy, read every week. A few big ones didn’t fit the parameters (XYCD, Cyanide and Happiness) and a few of the other ones that I know that are really large (Questionable Content, Ma3, and LICD) were all in the original list of 500, but weren’t pulled. Those are pretty much the only large ones I know of. This wasn’t a survey of the most popular webcomics anyway (although that could be something to do in the future) this was one of ALL webomics. (And by the way, they were all “real, live, and updating”.) Thewebcomiclist has almost 20,000 comics on their site and there was an estimate a few years ago that there are almost 50,000 webcomics online, and honestly, I believe that’s somewhat low. There are so many webcomics on the web, and most of them AREN’T popular. If I missed most well-know, widely-followed webcomics, that’s probably a very good thing, because how many is that? The popular webcomics are a tiny percentage of what’s out there so they be a tiny percentage of what’s in the study. (Also, some really popular webcomics were included. Girlswithslingshots, Family Man, Scandanavia and the World, and Gunnerkrieg Court were all mentioned over and over again when I was talking to people about this. If you’ve never heard of any of these, then guess what? My theory that everyone reads very different webcomics might just be true. I had never heard of 3 of those, but they were mentioned like 10 times each.)

In short, the comics YOU read every week are a tiny, tiny, miniscule percentage of what’s out there. It’s not possible to keep up with a majority of comics that update regularly.

As for it not being the best statistical model, I’m not up on statistics, but I did a little reading, and it looks like for the large set of data I had, simple random sampling was the best choice. Other options seemed to need more data than is available. There has not been any studies on webcomics really, that I’ve been able to find, other than this one. The distribution of webcomics isn’t known. How many comics are fantasy, how many are romance, how many are pornographic. There is no way to get a representative sample in that regards either, although I would have liked too.

The data on choosing the list is here.

Also, just because I didn’t study the popular ones, doesn’t mean it’s not true for them anyways. I would love to know how everyone’s favorite webcomics compare and if you want to submit stats on your favorites, I can start compiling a list of those. Just make sure to read all the parameters* that the webcomics had to fit to be included in the study and what qualifies as a character*.

*This information can be found at the same location as the data on choosing the list. Link found above.

For more information, go here.

Sat, 26 May 2012 15:56:01 -0400

For more information, go here.

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:05:29 -0400

For more information, go here.

a boatful of monsters and miracles: “I think there’s a perception that making an effort to be inclusive...

Thu, 24 May 2012 17:17:49 -0400

a boatful of monsters and miracles: “I think there’s a perception that making an effort to be inclusive...:

sennical:

“I think there’s a perception that making an effort to be inclusive means artlessly shoehorning a bunch of unnatural “politically correct” material from a master checklist handed down from the Office of the Liberal Elite.

First of all, the OLE doesn’t hand those out, you have to request them. Second, you don’t need the list anyway. Just stop going out of your way to do things like this:

(spoiler alert: it is actually super easy not to do that)

One “defense” for not making the effort to be inclusive is, “Aw, but man, I don’t want to have to think about this stuff, I just want to read/write stories.”

And, y’know what? We’re sympathetic to that. Thinking about it can be really taxing, confusing, and depressing. Imagine if you had to think about that stuff all the time. Perhaps due to being not white? Or not male? Or not straight?

We want our dumb robot comic to be the easiest thing in the world to enjoy, and that means it doesn’t get to make anyone feel icky when they read it.”

— Brian Clevinger [x]

This guy gets it! Super amazing post and better worded than I could ever manage. Take note everyone!

technologistrevolution: problemswithwebcomics: technologistrevo...

Thu, 24 May 2012 16:01:00 -0400

technologistrevolution:

problemswithwebcomics:

technologistrevolution:

problemswithwebcomics:

About this Comic

I’m curious how many of the “gay romances” were written with gay men as the intended audience or if (as I suspect) most were written by women with women as the intended audience. Especially since it is the focus.

It’d be nice to have gay characters with the “roundedness” and creativity of straight protagonists (who get to be wizards, or fight as rebels in dystopian futures, or bring down Galactic Empires, or explore space) but was as undeniably gay as those are straight (fetishists aside who will deny anything for their fetish).

I totally looked this up after you said this. Actually the 3 comics focused on gay male relationships in the above comic were all written by men, although 1 was then drawn by a woman. I’m unsure about the intended audience. I see your point though; that does happen a lot. There were an additional 3 comics that had gay male main characters and 2 of those were written by woman and the third’s gender was unknown.

I included a short list of comics with well-rounded (in my opinion) gay main characters that do things. (They get to fight as rebels, explore and fight in space, road trip, and be attacked by government agencies respectively.)

Artifice: “Smart Guy-on-Guy Sci Fi” (In space! With shootouts!)

Goodbye Chains : “Colin Lord is a cheerful Boston Communist, and Banquo White is a cranky half-Mexican with no philosophy beyond hedonism. Somehow they have become partners in crime, spreading a reign of terror and dialectical materialism across the plains of Colorado. Follow their adventures with explosives and ladies—and, possibly, men.”

Robots and Racks : “Being a story about girls flying around in space.”

The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal : “In the span of a single day, Amal calls off his arranged marriage, comes out to his conservative parents, promptly gets disowned, goes on a bender… and wakes up the next morning to find TJ, a lanky, dreadlocked vagrant, frying eggs and singing Paul Simon in his kitchen.

TJ claims that the two have made a drunken pact to drive all the way from Berkeley to Providence. As it happens, Amal promised his sister he’d be there for her graduation from Brown University. And TJ, well… TJ has his own reasons.

The agreement is simple: Amal does the driving; TJ pays the way - but a 3500 mile journey leaves plenty of time for things to get complicated.”

Love is In the Blood : “When government agencies come to archaeologist Laila McCarthy for assistance, they are unaware her knowledge of dangerous relics was gained first-hand. But ancient enemies remember her as Sumerian demon Lamashtu and the first vampire.”

I’ve seen Artifice around but never read it, never realised it’s MCs were gay. I’ll have to take a look.

I actually looked at Goodbye Chains in the past but from my fuzzy memory I don’t have much positive to say about its treatment of the gay MCs (or their lesbian twinned counterparts) or the half Mexican character (and his lesbian counterpart). I am surprised the author is male… but maybe I shouldn’t be. It’s not like that eliminates problems inherently. Also, I may need to re-read it as it might’ve been when I was reading it rather than what I was reading that ave me the trouble.

I’ll take a look at the others as well as they are completely new to me. Thanks for the recs… and the interesting tumblr.

I can’t say much about Goodbye Chains or the rest as far as quality goes. Tj and Amal is the only one I have read completely through. Also, these aren’t all done by authors that are the same gender as their characters. Goodbye chains is actually done by women. These are just ones that I know have fairly main non-heteronormative characters that are not romance comics. Thank you for the reblogs and comments.

For more information, go here.

Wed, 23 May 2012 16:03:08 -0400

For more information, go here.

Ladydrawers Tumblr

Wed, 23 May 2012 14:58:50 -0400

The tumblr I reference where all the information on webcomic creators is, is officially starting to post. If I remember right, it’s going to post once a day and there was a 15-30 post queue worked up, so stay tuned.

http://ladydrawers.tumblr.com/

darrylayo: problemswithwebcomics: For more information, go...

Tue, 22 May 2012 16:04:18 -0400

darrylayo:

problemswithwebcomics:

For more information, go here.

what? Okay, buddy.

Yes? Questions?

I’m assuming this is disbelief or personal experience of romance webcomics based around a lesbian relationship and would like to say that this was a study of 100 webcomics, as randomly selected as possible to give as true of a representative sample as I could manage, and there were no comics with romantic or sexual relationships as the main storyline in that webcomic where the relationships were about lesbians.

There were some with prominent gay female women, some of them listed here, and I would like to add Girls With Slingshots to that list, as it has prominent gay, bi, and asexual characters, as well as one of two cross dressing characters I saw during the course of the study.

If this wasn’t it, feel free to shoot back questions, I’m just a little unclear what the skepticism was regarding.

I was excited to learn from your comics that Ladydrawers has a tumblr (I've seen them on the poorly-organized Truthout), but that tumblr looks empty. They list a wordpress address there, and that has content (nothing recent, though sidebar links to Truthout comics look up to date).

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:03:57 -0400

Yes, I’ve noticed that too. Someone in the lady drawers class created the tumblr meant for all the collected data of this year thus far and I know he has at least drafts of all the posts with the data about webcomic creators that I reference in the comics. I keep expecting them to start up but they haven’t yet. I’ll email him and see what’s going on with that.

Considering that only about 5-15% of the American population is LGBTQPA, doesn't it make logical sense that the webcomics would have roughly the same proportion? After all, webcomics are a business and are designed to appeal to their audience--not their creator. Thus, regardless of the sexuality or gender of the creator the main focus would be on the audience.

Sun, 20 May 2012 19:07:15 -0400

In that sense it does make sense. I mention that in the comic- that compared to a study by the Williams institute at UCLA, the lgbtqx community is overrepresented in comics. I was just mentioning that it turns out that is a reflection of the creators and in that regard, creators underrepresented themselves. That was the one stat where I was actually fairly happy with the pure number. The problem, of course, is the number of transgender and gender queer characters (0). Also, some of the representations of the lgbtqx community were less than flattering and there were at least two cases that I remember where a character’s sexuality was an ongoing “joke”.

There’s the additional problem of representation of people of color. If webcomic creation is a business meant to reach the most number of people possible and should not reflect the creators, there should be way more characters of color because right now, when you’re looking at characters with a human race (not green aliens or talking cats), 79% are white. You can blame that on the larger proportion of white webcomic creators than is the average in the US or you can say webcomics is a business where it makes sense characters are reflecting the national average rather than the webcomic creator average.

For more information, go here.

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:02:12 -0400

For more information, go here.

For more information go here.

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:03:29 -0400

For more information go here.

technologistrevolution: problemswithwebcomics: About this...

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:03:00 -0400

technologistrevolution:

problemswithwebcomics:

About this Comic

I’m curious how many of the “gay romances” were written with gay men as the intended audience or if (as I suspect) most were written by women with women as the intended audience. Especially since it is the focus.

It’d be nice to have gay characters with the “roundedness” and creativity of straight protagonists (who get to be wizards, or fight as rebels in dystopian futures, or bring down Galactic Empires, or explore space) but was as undeniably gay as those are straight (fetishists aside who will deny anything for their fetish).

I totally looked this up after you said this. Actually the 3 comics focused on gay male relationships in the above comic were all written by men, although 1 was then drawn by a woman. I’m unsure about the intended audience. I see your point though; that does happen a lot. There were an additional 3 comics that had gay male main characters and 2 of those were written by woman and the third’s gender was unknown.

I included a short list of comics with well-rounded (in my opinion) gay main characters that do things. (They get to fight as rebels, explore and fight in space, road trip, and be attacked by government agencies respectively.)

Artifice: “Smart Guy-on-Guy Sci Fi” (In space! With shootouts!)

Goodbye Chains : “Colin Lord is a cheerful Boston Communist, and Banquo White is a cranky half-Mexican with no philosophy beyond hedonism. Somehow they have become partners in crime, spreading a reign of terror and dialectical materialism across the plains of Colorado. Follow their adventures with explosives and ladies—and, possibly, men.”

Robots and Racks : “Being a story about girls flying around in space.”

The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal : “In the span of a single day, Amal calls off his arranged marriage, comes out to his conservative parents, promptly gets disowned, goes on a bender… and wakes up the next morning to find TJ, a lanky, dreadlocked vagrant, frying eggs and singing Paul Simon in his kitchen.

TJ claims that the two have made a drunken pact to drive all the way from Berkeley to Providence. As it happens, Amal promised his sister he’d be there for her graduation from Brown University. And TJ, well… TJ has his own reasons.

The agreement is simple: Amal does the driving; TJ pays the way - but a 3500 mile journey leaves plenty of time for things to get complicated.”

Love is In the Blood : “When government agencies come to archaeologist Laila McCarthy for assistance, they are unaware her knowledge of dangerous relics was gained first-hand. But ancient enemies remember her as Sumerian demon Lamashtu and the first vampire.”